


idle hands

by altilis



Series: careful, ren. [8]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Lightsabers, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 20:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6128691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altilis/pseuds/altilis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Kylo left for his training, Hux restarted an old hobby. (In contrast, the Force consumes every waking moment of Kylo's day - or it used to.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	idle hands

“What do you see when you meditate?” Hux asks one night while they share a drink in Hux’s office, two chairs pulled close together in front of the large observation porthole. He sees Kylo get a distant look, the dark room and the ambient starlight exaggerating the features of his face.

“I see the Force,” Kylo says, but even that answer doesn’t sound entirely truthful: Hux doubts that the Force alone could bring Kylo to tears, or make him scream, or drive him into such a melancholy that Hux has to accelerate their plans to colonize this planet or that system just to give Kylo something to kill or destroy. He’s usually calm after that.

“What else?” Hux pushes, pouring more brandy into Kylo’s near-empty glass.

“Memories. Training. Visions.” Kylo takes a large gulp from his glass, and it’s nearly empty again. “No more than anyone else.”

Hux snorts and takes a sip from his own glass. He supposes he’s fortunate not to be tied to that conduit of power, at the mercy of it and its interaction with the fragile structures of the mind. “Have you tried a less vulnerable activity to access those things?” 

“Like marauding?”

“Like puzzles.”

Kylo looks over to him, his expression closed and unreadable. “Puzzles won’t help me defeat that girl.” (Ever since returning from Snoke’s citadel, Kylo has refused to say her name; it’s silly, but Hux knows who he’s talking about.)

“And sitting quietly in the dark will?”

“I’m engaging the Force, Hux.” Kylo sticks out his glass, silently asking for more brandy. Hux obliges. “The better grasp I have over it, the less likely she’ll use it against me.”

“And for the rest of us?” 

Kylo looks at him, then down into the depths of his glass, and doesn’t answer.

\-- 

Hux’s earliest memories are of warm rain and breathing in the damp, floral aroma of his mother’s roses. Supposedly they used to have a house on Arkanis, right outside the Academy; his mother had a handful of pictures of a fat baby sitting in the shade of blossoming ferns or bundled up in a slick camouflage rain coat, so it must be true.

But Hux tells Kylo that he grew up on a star destroyer: running through hallways with hard tile and stark white light, glimpsing hyperspace between rigid classes of history and mathematics, always feeling that space was never more than a few inches of durasteel and titanium away. He knows how the engines work, what the different hums mean, how the MSE droids follow their routine among fifty-seven residential floors, the window of forgiveness you have when you throw a favorite toy (or Father’s formal hat) down the garbage chute and you want it back before it’s discharged into the vacuum of space.

“Aren’t you sick of ships, then?” Kylo asks him, pulling himself on top of Hux while they lie in bed and smothering him with the weight of his muscle and power. 

Hux wraps his arms around Kylo’s shoulders, tangling his hands in that thick, dark hair and pulling because he can. “By that reasoning, wouldn’t you be sick of cities?” Hux asks, recalling Kylo telling him about Coruscant, Hosnia, Naboo, Bespin, a hundred different settlements of Imperial defectors all clamoring for a look at Kylo’s mother, surrounding their family in a perpetual cloud of adoration and attention. 

Kylo turns his head against Hux’s chest, his hesitation heavy in the silence; Hux allows himself a small, conceited smile. He knows Kylo loves cities--or maybe he just loves the way the Force feels in them, what Kylo had once described as the overwhelming ‘being’ of a crowd pressing against his nerves, drowning out the distinct edges of his own existence. Hux just likes the way he acts drunk without brandy after overwhelming public adventures, the way Kylo singularly focuses on him when they finally have a moment alone and hangs on his every word. 

“Besides,” Hux continues, squeezing the back of Kylo’s neck and feeling him relax, “I spent five years on a freezing rock, building a weapon that you let be destroyed.”

“I thought you had gotten over that already.”

“I have,” Hux lies, scratching his nails on the side of Kylo’s neck. “And it was a nice change of pace, to get back to the ship.”

 

When his family lived on the Gauntlet, an unimpressive and ordinary star destroyer, his father gave him a model TIE Fighter--in pieces. To this day, Hux doesn’t know where his father got this toy, or what he expected Hux to do with it, but Hux went to his classes the next day and successfully smuggled a small jar of glue out of the children’s droid workshop, then spent the next two weeks sitting in the corner of the living room with those pieces, that jar, and an old paintbrush (that he also stole).

Obviously, things are different now: he can get whatever model he wants, he certainly doesn’t have to steal glue or brushes, and now he has a small collection of paints to go along with it. He just doesn’t have as much time--except when Kylo had been away for training. 

He started an old Imperial-class star destroyer model while Kylo was away, something like the Gauntlet, and even when Kylo returns to the ship (and his bedroom, his tight embrace), he finds some time during lunch to make progress on the ship: a turret here, a cannon there. 

Sometimes, Kylo watches. Just watches--he’s not allowed to touch. (Hux knows where the nearest airlock is, and tells Kylo this.) He sits in the chair in front of Hux’s desk, folds his hands together, and stares as Hux lines little pieces with glue and precisely places parts on a half-constructed star destroyer that stretches across two thirds of the desk. 

“You’re taking too long,” Kylo declares one day, during a week that Hux knows Kylo is particularly frustrated (too many calls from his knights, too many missions, not enough time to stretch out on Hux’s bed and let himself be used; Hux feels it too).

“I’m patient,” Hux says, not looking at the restless man across the desk as he uses tweezers to place a sensor array on the command tower. “Perhaps if you were more patient and detail-oriented, Lord Ren,” he drawls the title, “your lightsaber would be less a saw and more a blade.”

Kylo sits still, not breathing for a long moment, and then he rises from his chair and leaves the office.

 

They don’t have dinner that night because of work -- Hux has to coordinate with his project managers at the Forge, and Kylo has to train. It’s part of their agreement now--equal parts to keep Kylo strong and to keep Hux alive. Neither of them think Snoke will tolerate someone dragging Kylo into stagnation. 

Before bed, Hux takes a shower under a vicious hot spray that reddens his pale skin and loosens his muscles. He feels cleansed to his bones as he steps out of the fresher, running a towel through his hair, then pauses.

Kylo sits on the side of his bed, framed by the glow of a distant star in the window behind him. In his hand he holds the neck of a plain brown sack that hangs over the edge of the bed and nudges against his thigh.

“You come bearing gifts?” Hux questions, walking towards Kylo as he scrubs the last bit of water from his damp hair. Kylo watches with that unwavering focus of his, unblinking eyes so dark as he watches Hux’s every step, and then reaches out with his free hand for Hux’s hip when he gets close enough. 

Hux grabs his wrist before his fingers can touch flesh, waits. Kylo takes a shaky breath, then his gaze snaps up to Hux’s face, his eyes tight. “Please,” he whispers.

“Better,” Hux says as he eases his grip on Kylo’s wrist; a strong grip fixes on his hip, fingertips curling into his skin, Kylo’s callused thumb brushing across his hipbone with silent reverence. Hux steps closer between Kylo’s knees, and Kylo leans forward ever so slightly to brush his nose against the trail of pale red hair trailing down his navel. 

“Let me guess,” Hux says, dropping the towel onto the bed and then sliding his hands over Kylo’s shoulders, still covered by robes and armor. “Extra rations?” Kylo huffs a laugh, hot breath low on Hux’s navel. “Crystals? The ones you didn’t use for your new saber.”

“Almost,” Kylo murmurs against his skin.

“Cut crystals? You know I’m not one for jewelry.”

“I bet if you were given any you would be,” Kylo chuckles; his hand slides down the side of Hux’s thigh, brushes behind his knee. “Sit with me? Please.”

“Starting to get used to that word, now?” Hux says as he sits down on the bed next to Kylo, hand dragging along his sleeves. He watches as Kylo reaches into the sack by his feet and pulls out something that is half-familiar: the hilt of a light saber, but not like Kylo’s. It doesn’t have the cross guards, and there are brass rings around the body. “Whose is that?”

“Mine.” Kylo hefts it in his hand for a moment, then activates it. An ice-blue blade grows out of the hilt, slower than Kylo’s normal red weapon, and then it holds with a quiet, constant hum and an unbroken beam. Hux can’t help but stare at it, the light drowning out all the other reflections in the room.

“Is this your first?” Hux asks.

Kylo shakes his head, and recalls the beam. “No, I sent that back to my parents soon after--after I made the one you know. I made this one while training with Snoke this time.” He tosses it onto the floor and grabs another one from the sack. The body is half as long with a broad pommel, lined with black metal. When Kylo activates it, a beam of aquamarine erupts, but stops to be a third as long as the normal saber. 

“Dagger,” Kylo explains, nonchalant, then deactivates it and also tosses it on the floor. 

Kylo shows him three more lightsabers, turquoise and azure and teal, each of them not quite as long as Kylo’s signature red saber, and each time Kylo discards them onto the pile on the floor, where they lie in a heap of wildly different styles of bodies, pommels, and emitters. Some have the metal conductor rings, some do not, some have slim, flat tops and others have arching claws to isolate the smooth, solid blade of light.

“If you can make all of these,” Hux asks, gesturing to the pile of weapons on his bedroom floor, “why choose your hilted monstrosity?”

Kylo shrugs. “I want a red one.” 

Hux rubs his brow, closing his eyes as he stomachs the reminder that Kylo is a sentimental, irrational, stubborn force of nature. “...so you work until you find a crystal you can force to be a particular color, and you finish with a sword that looks about to short circuit at any moment.”

“I want the quillons, too,” Kylo points out, oblivious to Hux’s judgment. “They can be useful.”

“I’m sure,” Hux acknowledges, patting Kylo on the thigh. “A better question: why show me these? One would think you’d have tossed your failures into the trash compactor by now.”

“I did.” Kylo raises a hand and the weapons lift off the floor, then float over to Hux’s desk where they line up neatly in a row, balanced on their pommels. “But these are decent. They work.”

“Always a good feature.”

“You can have them, if you want.”

Hux laughs. He’s not entirely sure why he does, what’s so humorous about weapons that can cut him in two lined up on the edge of his cabin desk, so straight he could have set them there himself. But Kylo isn’t laughing: he’s watching Hux with that wide-eyed sort of expectation that now leans on the side of self-protection--and Hux isn’t ready to assuage that just yet.

He gets up from the bed and walks over to the desk to swipe the smallest hilt off the desk; this one was teal, he recalls. Turning it over in his hand, he asks Kylo, “Why give these to me? Aren’t you afraid I’ll cut you open while you sleep?” 

Kylo leans back on one hand, stretching out the long, flat plain of his torso, and letting Hux see his preferred saber hanging from his belt. “There are worse fates.”

That earns a snort from Hux, who turns his attention back to the body of the blade in his hand. He turns it over, looking at the conductor rings and the undulating metal. He finds the switch on the side, checks he’s holding it the right way, and pushes the switch with his thumb. The beam erupts, extending a long beam of teal that hums quietly in stasis.

“It’s too light,” Hux murmurs, letting his wrist relax as he swings it gently from side to side, focusing on the dip in the hum as it cuts through the air. The weight of it hasn’t shifted; it balances the same, ignited or not. “For the power it has, it’s too light. How do you stop it from leaping from your hand? Or from injuring yourself?” 

“The Force,” Kylo answers, a smug smile on his face.

“You’re insufferable,” Hux hisses at him, not in the mood for his indescribable mysticism or caged answers. He touches the switch on the handle again, watches the beam recede, and then sets it back down on the desk. He already has Kylo in his bed; that’s enough risk for the night.

“Perhaps you’re waiting for me to try these sabers, then slip and kill myself,” Hux says as he steps over to Kylo, standing between his knees. The proximity jerks Kylo back to attention: he sits up, he slides his gloved hands over Hux’s hips, he tilts his head back to watch Hux’s face, and the rapt attention stirs an ugly satisfaction that he can hold Kylo’s attention as tight as he can grip Kylo’s dark hair in his fingers. “Is that it, Ren?”

“No,” Kylo breathes. “I want you protected.”

Hux pulls Kylo’s head back even further, bends closer until he can see the starlight in Kylo’s dark eyes. “I have Phasma and her troops. I have this entire starship, and the best fleet in the galaxy. What difference will your little swords do me?”

Kylo’s hands start to slide up Hux’s sides, his touch heavy and firm, but it doesn’t scare Hux: this is just Kylo being desperate for touch--“I can show you.”

His first mistake is meeting Kylo’s gaze. His second is not looking away.

The room recedes from his vision, taking Kylo and the light and air with it for a still, silent moment before the atmosphere rushes back at him. Hux takes a breath and he smells the hot ash, sulfur and carbon and the tang of metal. Embers flit through the air, the only light against the darkness before the world turns again: his boots sink into fine black ash and rock, lava rivers flow at the peripheries of his vision, lined with the charred remains of an old-growth forest. 

In the distance the ground slopes upwards onto a plateau and he sees Kylo’s red lightsaber clash against a solid blue saber, both combatants shrouded in thick cloaks despite the suffocating heat, whirling fast and hard with a smoky, starry sky behind them. 

Hux hears the ignition of two sabers from his left and looks over to see a smaller figure rush towards him with a double-bladed gold saber, footsteps impossibly light against the ash. He reaches for his holster, but there’s no blaster, there’s nothing but mud on his belt. He steps back as the gold saber swings up and takes a breath--

The room snaps back into place, but now Kylo stands in front of him, his hands cupping Hux’s face, the leather cool against his flushed cheeks. “What was that,” Hux pants, his mouth still feeling parched and gritty.

“A recurring vision,” Kylo tells him; his gaze doesn’t leave Hux’s face. “Once is a dream. Three times is a counselor’s visit. Ten times is the Force.” 

Hux swallows hard. “Or neurosis.”

The corner of Kylo’s mouth quirks. “If only it was,” he says, then takes a kiss. Hux finds his motor skills enough to raise his hands and dig his fingers into Kylo’s sleeves, wishing Kylo had stripped earlier so that Hux could feel warm skin and hard muscle instead. 

Kylo doesn’t pull back all the way when the kiss ends; he leans their foreheads together and Hux swears he can feel warmth spread down along his nerves, as if knitted gaberwool were unfurling itself over his skin. “I want to show you how to use my lightsabers--and to keep one on your belt,” he says quietly, “even if you’ll never use it or appreciate it. I want you to know how it feels for me.”

“And I’ll find a good blaster rifle,” Hux murmurs, squeezing too-tight on Kylo’s arms, “to show you that it’s vastly superior to these ancient weapons, especially those of us less _gifted_.” 

Kylo chuckles. “General, remember that I was the son of smugglers and rebels, and that in certain parts of the galaxy I am pirate above all else.” He shifts, his lips brushing Hux’s jaw, then his neck. “I’ve had my fill of blasters,” he says, and bites to bruise just above Hux’s collarbone, enough to make him gasp, enough to make him hard.

\--

Phasma looks pointedly at the hilt clipped to the side of Hux's belt, holding her highball glass of sparkling water. The officer's lounge is quiet at this point in gamma shift. "There's some talk now that you're secretly adept in the Force now, too." 

Hux can't say he's pleased about the gossip, but he gives a grim smile nonetheless. "It wouldn't be much of a secret now, would it?"

"My troops are also wondering that you might be turning into a Knight of Ren. Or you've been one all along." 

"Me, a Knight?" Hux laughs. "And what do you think of that?"

"I think it's better than them speculating the truth: that Lord Ren is smitten with you, and now he's gone so far as to give you, and train you in, priceless weapons. Weapons those bureaucrats in the capital would kill for just to decorate their own suits." Phasma takes a sip of her water. "If he were one of your officers, I'd congratulate you on capturing his attention. But now he's just as likely to submit to your order as you are to become one of his knights. That's a draw, as far as your survival goes." 

Hux swirls the whiskey in his glass, thinking of the short practice sessions he's had with Kylo: the way the man feels pressed against his back, hand around his on the hilt, guiding his movements and murmuring directions to his ear with the certainty of fifteen years of expertise. "It's only a lightsaber, Phasma."

She gives him a look. "It's _Kylo Ren's_ lightsaber, crafted by him and given directly to you, possibly made _for_ you. And it's better if no one knows that particular fact, sir."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also [on tumblr](http://cutequirk.tumblr.com).


End file.
